The search for less expensive, more effective, and more environmentally sound methods of creating building foundations for new construction on previously undisturbed or undesirable building sites has led to the development by the applicant of the Pinned Foundation System. (See, U.S. Pat. No. 5,039,256 incorporated herein by reference.) These systems are an important advance in foundation engineering and have expanded the availability of select sites for surface structures.
Most foundation systems used in significant structure support require meaningful amounts of cement or concrete. The use of concrete or other cementitious material is often an unattractive option for a growing number of building sites. These sites are invariably inaccessible to concrete trucks and pumping systems. Indeed, to the environmentally conscious, concrete itself is comprised of non-renewable resources which are expensively produced and demand environmentally destructive methods of extraction.
A variety of structure to earth, load transferring systems, which do not rely on a cementitious material, have been developed including U.S. Pat. Nos. 1,808,633 and 2,964,145. (See, also, U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,826,281, 5,039,256, 1,783,713, 2,221,325 and 2,815,778). The significant drawback of these systems is that they are primarily limited to one or another of the three types of loads-bearing, lateral and uplift, and lack the versatility needed to address significant structure support.
In addition to eliminating the need for cementitious material in significant structure foundations, it is also desirable that the types and possible combinations of loads is increased, and the range of possible surface structures to which these systems can be applied is widened. The present invention was developed to fulfill these objectives.